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Recordings

Accompanied by Eugene Asti, Sarah Connolly sings songs by Haydn, Brahms, Hahn, Korngold and Weill. Her distinctive, intelligent, warm, bright-sounding mezzo-soprano will be enjoyed by her growing 'army' of fans in this rich, romantic repertoire.» More

Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert and Schumann songs series for Hyperion are landmarks in the history of recorded music. Now this indefatigable performer and scholar turns to the songs and vocal works of Brahms. Hyperion is delighted to present t ...» More

This is surely one of Brahms’s most famous songs, and the favour it finds with recitalists (usually female) is explained by its perfect dramatic shape, like a scene from a play, or more precisely, a screenplay. The locale is Upper Lusatia (Lausitz), a Slavic region, now partly German, partly Polish, inhabited by the Sorbs (or Wends) where a population of about 60,000 with a dying language still struggles for autonomy to this day.

We begin with a distant shot of a bleak landscape (bars 1–21), as barren as the lives of those peasants who inhabit it, a place, the music seems to tell us, of fear, prejudice and superstition where even the birds are silent. From bar 25 we see two figures, those of a young man and woman walking together. At bar 34 they pass a meadow with bushes, scene of the whirlwind birth and clandestine continuation of their passionate relationship. On this occasion they do not stop at this place of tryst where they might have dallied in happier times. As the metaphorical camera following them moves into close-up, we learn they are having an argument as they walk. At bar 45, the fifth verse in this poem of two-line strophes, the young man launches into a self-hating diatribe: he is less well-off than his girlfriend, perhaps there is even an ethnic barrier that separates them in a part of the world famous for such divisions; he is concerned that she is suffering opprobrium as a result of their friendship; he assures her that they can be parted as quickly, and as tempestuously, as they had first been united. The piano interlude that follows this outburst (bars 68–78) is famous for tripping-up pianists; while triplets continue to clatter in the right hand the left conducts a dialogue between its bass and alto registers—booming octaves for the man’s protestations, sixths higher up in the stave for the girl’s soothing replies in a more feminine tessitura. This purely instrumental argument winds down and softens in such a way that we can almost see the young man breaking down in tears as he is cradled in the girl’s comforting arms.

At bar 79 the tempo changes to Ziemlich langsam; the time-signature is now a gently rocking 6/8 (a berceuse to remind us that every man in trouble needs a mother), and B minor cedes to a visionary B major. The reason why what follows is so miraculous is probably because we are allowed to see into Brahms’s very soul: these are the words, initially soft and supportive, then strong and determined, that a boy from the wrong side of the tracks would dream of hearing from a woman capable of solving all his problems of self-esteem, a woman calmly determined to love him despite his perceived unworthiness, the woman who would insist on staying with him through thick and thin—and the woman Brahms was never to allow himself to marry. Much of the girl’s reply, her affirmation of devotion, is sung in the velvety region of the mezzo-soprano voice to which the composer was always drawn. Perhaps her father is a blacksmith because she chooses the metaphor of iron and steel to say that, although these two metals can be separated with the hammer (these blows are distantly audible in the off-beat octave F sharps from bar 98), their love is impervious to whatever blows her family may have in store for them. The richness of harmony and texture, the grandness of utterance (here aided by an exciting accelerando as the girl works herself up to a pitch of bright-eyed determination) and the pervasive twos-against-threes, the composer’s favoured hemiola of rhythmic ambiguity, mark this out as textbook Brahms, a work that defines his song style. But it is hardly typical of his songs in general: the development of the story with its straightforward quasi-operatic narration is unusually unambiguous and easy to grasp. We note, however, that the work ends not triumphantly, but with four bars of postlude, a ritardando and diminuendo, that completely alter our perception of the story’s outcome. Of course it is possible to imagine the couple ending with a soft and tender embrace, but the song somehow extinguishes its own fire during this apologetic ending. Having allowed us to glimpse the girl’s passion and determination, the composer’s pessimism (he would say his sense of reality) triumphs: she may believe that she will fight the fight but Brahms trumps her: he clearly believes that this love affair is doomed—an incident of romantic failure and mésalliance of the kind in which he himself had been involved.

Brahms ascribed this poem to the Bohemian poet Josef Wenzig (1807–1876) which accounts for the fact that it continues to appear in recital halls around the world with this misattribution. My guess is that the composer found the text in a book probably borrowed from Schumann’s library—Oskar Wolff’s Hausschatz der Volkspoesie (1850, p. 165) where it is embedded with four other surrounding poems by Wenzig and has no attribution at all—seemingly the result of an oversight. In fact, the poet-translator’s name was left out of Wolff’s book because the famous-notorious Hoffmann von Fallersleben had been involved in the recent revolutionary activities of 1848. But ‘Dunkel, wie dunkel’ had first appeared in this poet’s Gedichte (1837), where it is the third of five Wendische Lieder aus der Oberlausitz (the original and more literal translator from the Wendisch or Sorbian language had been one Leopold Haupt), and it is Hoffmann von Fallersleben who should get the credit alongside Brahms in concert programmes. The song’s title seems to come from the composer himself—he had originally intended to call it simply Ewig.